Each project supported in 2023 as part of animating the cultural strategy in action began with a collective imagining in December 2022 where local creatives articulated multiple visions of very different cultural futures in Dudley. What If questions generated from to these visions invited local people to question different elements of the existing cultural landscape or status quo, and imagine alternative/ more flourishing futures. These creative enquiries were made real by over 400 people using 25 different types of creative practices in 38 different spaces to imagine and enact pathways to those futures.

In December 2023 over sixty creatives and collaborators come together to showcase the new cultural and creative narratives patiently being forged with multiple layers of meaning making, through a diversity of cultural actions, and multiplicity of voices. Narratives centred around an abundance of creative activity in everyday spaces, instinctive practices of collaboration and co-creation, and the role of cultural action in helping us as a community to reimagine our ways of being in the world, how we relate and care for each other and the rest of the natural world.